Rivista internazionale di tecnica della traduzione = International Journal of Translation
Abstract
Guidelines on plain legal and institutional Italian often suggest employing the subject-verb-object (SVO) constituent order. While this is indisputably the canonical order of syntactic arguments in Italian, a wide range of reasons exist to opt, in specific cases, for the preverbal position of the object or the postverbal position of the subject. This paper reviews the use of non-SVO sentences in a corpus of Swiss legislation translated into Italian. The quantitative analysis reveals that non-SVO sentences constitute a minority. Furthermore, the qualitative analysis shows that the vast majority of OVS, VOS and VS structures are either imposed by the syntactic nature of the verb (e.g. in the case of unaccusative verbs) or are justified by pragmatic and textual reasons. Indeed, they can foster thematic progression and contribute to the overall cohesion of the text. These results suggest that in addition to readability, comprehensibility must also be taken into account when dealing with plain language. Translation emerges as a key step to reflect on the textual construction of an institutional text and improve potential flaws; this includes rearranging the constituent order to better fit the reader’s mental representation process.
